This chapter is a science fiction story about a hunter named Eckels, who pays money to join a hunting party that will travel back to the late Jurassic Era, on a guided safari to kill a Tyrannosaurus rex. Although Eckels is initially excited about the hunt, when the monstrous Tyrannosaur approaches, he loses his nerve. Travis tells him he cannot leave, but Eckels panics, steps off the path and runs into the forest. Realizing that Eckels has fallen off the path, (...) Travis threatens to leave him in the past unless he removes the bullets from the dinosaur's body, as they cannot be left behind. He frantically pleads with Travis to take him back into the past to undo the damage, but Travis explains that the time machine cannot return to any point in time that has already been visited. Travis raises his gun, and there is “a sound of thunder”. (shrink)

_Why efforts to create a scientific basis of morality are doomed to fail_ In this illuminating book, James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky recount the centuries-long, passionate quest to discover a scientific foundation for morality. The "new moral science" led by such figures as E.O. Wilson, Patricia Churchland and Joshua Greene is only the newest manifestation of an effort that has failed repeatedly. Though claims for its accomplishments are often wildly exaggerated, this new iteration has been no more successful than (...) its predecessors. Hunter and Nedelisky argue that in the end, science cannot tell us how we should live or why we should be good and not evil, and this is for both philosophical and scientific reasons. In the face of this failure, the new moral science has taken a surprising turn. Whereas earlier efforts sought to demonstrate what is right and wrong, the new moral scientists have concluded that right and wrong, because they are not amenable to scientific study, don’t actually exist. Their moral nihilism turns the science of morality into a social engineering project. If there is nothing moral for science to discover, the science of morality becomes, at best, a program to achieve arbitrary societal goals. Concise and rigorously argued, _Science and the Good _is a major critique of a would-be science that has gained too much influence in today’s public discourse, and an exposé of that project’s darker turn. (shrink)

Rival Enlightenments, first published in 2001, is a major reinterpretation of early modern German intellectual history. Ian Hunter approaches philosophical doctrines as ways of fashioning personae for envisaged historical circumstances, here of confessional conflict and political desacralization. He treats the civil philosophy of Pufendorf and Thomasius and the metaphysical philosophy of Leibniz and Kant as rival intellectual cultures or paideiai, thereby challenging all histories premised on Kant's supposed reconciliation and transcendence of the field. This study reveals the extraordinary historical self-consciousness (...) of the civil philosophers, who repudiated university metaphysics as inimical to the intellectual formation of those administering desacralized territorial states. The book argues that the marginalization of civil philosophy in post-Kantian philosophical history may itself be seen as a continuation of the struggle between the rival enlightenments. Combining careful and well-documented scholarship with vivid polemic, Hunter presents penetrating insights for philosophers and historians alike. (shrink)

Since Dilthey’s template study of 1890, the Prussian state’s attempt to censor Kant’s religious writings has typically been seen as the work of a reactionary politics bent on imposing religious orthodoxy as a bulwark against the spread of Aufklärung. This paper offers a revisionist interpretation, arguing that the attempted censoring was a by-product of a set of a longstanding Religionspolitik designed to achieve religious toleration through a system of regulated public confessions. Reaffirmed in the Religious Edict (1788) and the Censorship (...) Edict (1788), Prussian policy required acceptance of a plurality of public confessions whose stability was preserved through the restriction of public proselytising and the acceptance of private religious freedom. In breaking with this religious settlement, through their public advocacy of a true ‘religion of reason’, the religious rationalists of the theological Aufklärung breached the embargo on public proselytising, leading eventually to government’s attempt to censor Kant’s own ‘pure religion of reason’. (shrink)

Although science supplies medicine's “gold standard,” knowledge exercised in the care of patients is, like moral knowing, a matter of narrative, practical reason. Physicians draw on case narrative to store experience and to apply and qualify the general rules of medical science. Literature aids in this activity by stimulating moral imagination and by requiring its readers to engage in the retrospective construction of a situated, subjective account of events. Narrative truths are provisional, uncertain, derived from narrators whose standpoints are always (...) situated, particular, and uncertain, but open to comparison and reinterpretation. Reading is thus a model for knowing in both morality and clinical medicine. While principles remain essential to bioethics and science must always inform good clinical practice, the tendency to collapse morality into principles and medicine into science impoverishes both practices. Moral knowing is not separable from clinical judgment. While ethics must be open to discussion and interpretation by patients, families, and society, it is nevertheless substantively and epistemologically an inextricable part of a physician's clinical practice. (shrink)

Was Hume here claiming or implying that propositions about what men ought to do are radically different from purely factual propositions, and that they cannot ever be entailed by any purely factual propositions? No, despite Mr Hare, Professor Nowell-Smith, Professor Ayer, Miss Murdoch, Professor Flew, Mr Basson, and The Observer's Brief Guide to philosophy.

In this essay, I draw out some implications of a position called “Wittgensteinian Quasi-Fideism” for the theory and practice of interreligious communication. After setting out the main tenets of that position, I articulate what its theoretical and practical implications in this area would be if it were true. I thereby sketch a new, Wittgensteinian model of interreligious communication, concluding with a number of suggestions as to some points of focus for further work in this area.

In their development of causal decision theory, Allan Gibbard and William Harper advocate a particular method for calculating the expected utility of an action, a method based upon the probabilities of certain counterfactuals. Gibbard and Harper then employ their method to support a two-box solution to Newcomb’s paradox. This paper argues against some of Gibbard and Harper’s key claims concerning the truth-values and probabilities of counterfactuals involved in expected utility calculations, thereby disputing their analysis of Newcomb’s Paradox. If we are (...) right, then Gibbard and Harper’s method of calculating expected utility does not adequately represent rational choice. (shrink)

About 25 years ago, it came to light that a single combinatorial property determines both an important dividing line in model theory and machine learning. The following years saw a fruitful exchange of ideas between PAC-learning and the model theory of NIP structures. In this article, we point out a new and similar connection between model theory and machine learning, this time developing a correspondence between stability and learnability in various settings of online learning. In particular, this gives many new (...) examples of mathematically interesting classes which are learnable in the online setting. (shrink)

“Guy Bennett-Hunter dans «Tillich and Divine lneffabililty» affirme l‘étroite correlation entre l’affirmation tillichienne de l’ineffabilité divine et le rejet de l’ontothéologie. L’affirmation de leur incompatibilité lui semble une contribution majeure de Tillich à la pensée religieuse. Guy Bennett-Hunter part des déclarations bien connues où Tillich affirme que l’on ne saurait, à proprement parler, attribuer l’existence a Dieu puisque Dieu est «être même au-delà de l’essence et de l’existence». En d’autres termes, Dieu «mystére de l’être», «fondement et abîme de la raison», (...) résiste à la connaissance coneeptuelle et à l’articulation linguistique.” — Anne Marie Reijnen & France Farago. (shrink)

This volume responds to calls in visual and material cultural studies to move beyond the visual and to explore the multi-sensory impact of the image, across a wide range of cultural and historical contexts. What does it mean to do art history after the material and sensory turns? What is an image, if it is not purely visual phenomenon, and how does it prompt non-visual sensory experiences? The multi-sensoriality of the image was a less challenging concept before the occularcentric modern (...) age, and so this volume brings together a global array of scholars from multiple disciplines to explore these questions in pre-modern or non-western contexts, ranging from Minoan palace frescoes, to Roman statues, early church sermons, tombs of Byzantine saints, museum displays of Islamic artefacts of scent, medieval depictions of the voice, and Stuart court masques. Each chapter presents a means of appreciating images beyond the visual, demonstrating the new information and understanding that can consequently be gleaned from their material. As a collection, these chapters offer the student and scholar of art history and visual culture an array of exciting new approaches that can be applied to appreciate the multi-sensoriality of images in any context, as well as prompts for reflection on future directions in the study of images and its application. The Multi-Sensory Image thus illustrates that it is not only possible to explore the non-visual impact of images, but imperative. (shrink)

Clinical medicine is the application of scientific principles, rules of thumb, and a store of practical wisdom embodied in narratives of individual cases to the care of a person who is ill. Physicians are taught to observe and report the individual case both as a means of fitting nomothetic generalizations to the given circumstances and as a way of refining those generalizations. This narrative construction of illness is a principal way of knowing in medicine. In this view, disease is not (...) so much an entity as an identifiable chronological organization of the events of illness, and medicine, rather than a science, a rational science-using activity in the service of the ill. Keywords: medical epistemology, casuistry, clinical judgment, narrative CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

This paper investigates Street Fight Radio’s consumer community’s resistance to neoliberal financial consumer responsibilization. Extant scholarship critiques consumer responsibilization on ethical grounds for placing too much responsibility on consumers at the expense of institutional actors. It also describes some forms of aversion to parts of the responsibilization process among individuals and short-lived consumer collectives. However, it falls short of analyzing community-driven resistance to financial consumer responsibilization writ large, or consumers’ efforts to responsibilize other stakeholders. Our netnographic and ethnographic study of (...) Street Fight Radio (SFR), a populist grassroots political comedy radio show and podcast with a strong anti-neoliberal consumer community, addresses these previous theoretical limitations. Drawing from Foucault’s counter-conduct concept, we show how SFR’s consumer community bolsters and sustains community-level resistance to financial consumer responsibilization. It encourages consumers to push for collective protections from markets and responsibilize other actors to address systemic, structural precarity. Our analysis makes novel contributions by theorizing the role of community in sustaining resistance to consumer responsibilization and by demonstrating the role of precarious consumers’ performative staging of supposedly excessive, irresponsible consumption in reorienting consumer ethics. (shrink)

In _Confucius Beyond the_ Analects, Michael Hunter challenges the standard view of the _Analects_ as the earliest and most authoritative source of the teachings.

Summary Justifications of the humanities often employ a mythos that exceeds their historical dispositions and reach. This applies to justifications that appeal to an ?idea? of the humanities grounded in the cultivation of reason for its own sake. But the same problem affects more recent accounts that seek to shatter this idea by admitting an ?event? capable of dissolving and refounding the humanities in ?being?. In offering a sketch of the emergence of the modern humanities from early modern humanism, the (...) paper argues that these twin philosophical justifications fail to capture both the array of intellectual arts that have informed the humanities disciplines and the variety of uses to which these arts have been put. Nonetheless, the two philosophical constructions have had a concrete impact on the disposition of the modern humanities, seen in the respective structuralist and poststructuralist reconfigurations of the disciplines that began to take place under the banner of ?theory? during the 1960s. In discussing the effects of theory on the humanities in Australia, the paper focuses on the unforeseeable consequences of attempts to provide arts-based disciplines with a foundation either in cognitive structures or in an ?event? that shatters them. (shrink)

Many well-meaning “white” people adopt an antiracist agenda because we believe it provides the antidote to pernicious racialized inequity in the United States. Ironically, this schema maintains racism, strengthens whiteness as the measure of humanity, and inoculates us against imagining any alternative to racism’s logic. I argue that we can break the fetters of racism by framing whiteness as a principality and power. Perceived as a demonic force rather than an “identity,” we can perceive the goals of whiteness as well (...) as the spirituality that fuels it—and cast it out. We are then freed to “reinvent the future,” emancipated from racialized politics and its violence. (shrink)

Parti INTRODUCTION Wittgenstein sometimes suggested looking on words as instruments, for example in the following passages from ...

ABSTRACT Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War looks ever more like a slice of history rather than a contemporary reality. During those same twenty years, scholarship on science, technology, and the state during the Cold War era has expanded dramatically. Building on major studies of physics in the American context—often couched in terms of “big science”—recent work has broached scientific efforts in other domains as well, scrutinizing Cold War scholarship in increasingly international and comparative (...) frameworks. The essays in this Focus section take stock of current thinking about science and the Cold War, revisiting the question of how best to understand tangled (and sometimes surprising) relationships between government patronage and the world of ideas. (shrink)

Abstract:This article contextualizes the thought of the Zhuangzi 莊子 via the Classic of Poetry (Shijing 詩經), the most canonical textual tradition from the Warring States (fifth century to 221 b.c.e.) into the early imperial period. First, it reads the fantastical vignettes from the opening of chapter 1 "Free-and-Easy Wandering" (Xiaoyao you 逍遙遊), as parodies of Shi poetics. Second, it argues that the themes of "wandering" (you 遊) and "lodging" (yu 寓) stand as critical alternatives to the Shi preoccupation with homeward, (...) ruler-centric movements. Such connections open up new ways of understanding the development of Zhuangzian thought. (shrink)

We set up a general context in which one can prove Sauer-Shelah type lemmas. We apply our general results to answer a question of Bhaskar [1] and give a slight improvement to a result of Malliaris and Terry [7]. We also prove a new Sauer-Shelah type lemma in the context of op-rank, a notion of Guingona and Hill [4].

Introduction: De disciplina scolarium and the Boethian corpus -- Reproduction and philosophical life in the Consolatio philosophiae -- De disciplina and Translatio studii -- Boethian humor -- "Bitwixen game and ernest": contrary Boethianism in Troilus and Criseyde -- Boethius and the humanists: Valla, Badius, and persistence of De disciplina in print.

This article uses two national survey data sets to analyze the effects of skin color on life outcomes for African American and Mexican American women. Using a historical framework of European colonialism and slavery, this article explains how skin color hierarchies were established and are maintained. The concept of social capital is used to explain how beauty, defined through light skin, works as capital and as a stratifying agent for women on the dimensions of education, income, and spousal status. The (...) analysis shows that light skin predicts higher educational attainment for both groups of women. Light skin directly predicts higher personal earnings for African American women and indirectly affects personal earnings for Mexican American women. Light skin predicts higher spousal status for African American women but not for Mexican American women. (shrink)

Learn how to use breath, movement, sound, and stillness in a fresh and modern way to live an epic, Spiritually Fly life.

This paper demolishes the Churchlands' arguments for their Eliminative Materialism and casts doubt on the logical possibility of their thesis. In passing, the paper draws attention to a mistake in history of science made in one of the arguments.